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Genetic variability modulates the effect of habitat type and environmental conditions on early invasion success of Ailanthus altissima in Mediterranean ecosystems

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Abstract

At the early stages of an invasion by an exotic species, there are diverse environmental and genetic factors that limit its expansion. Ailanthus altissima is a tree from China and northern Vietnam which has become an invasive species in numerous ecosystems around the word. Our objective was to identify the relative effect of both genetic and environmental factors and how they interact with the emergence and early establishment of this invasive tree under Mediterranean conditions. To achieve this, seed germination and early establishment from different maternal sources were analyzed under contrasted environmental conditions in a series of experiments, using both laboratory and field approaches. Seed germination and early survival were affected by environmental factors such as habitat-type, the percentage of bare soil and climatic conditions (rainfall pulses), although the influence of these factors changed depending on the maternal source. Our study reveals that the genetic component affected not only the performance of A. altissima, it also modulated its response to environmental factors, which seemed to be the main drivers of germination and early establishment for this species. Our results highlight the importance of considering both genetic and environmental factors when studying plant invasion risk and success, and may be helpful in predicting and reducing the spread of this species in Mediterranean ecosystems.

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Acknowledgments

S. Soliveres and two anonymous reviewers provided helpful comments and improvements on an early version of this manuscript. We also thank Language Centre (University of Alicante) and C. Beans for improving the English of this manuscript. We are grateful to the staff of the Font Roja Natural Park (Generalitat Valenciana), Alcoy Council and J.L. Ferrándiz (landowner) for the permits provided and their collaboration. We would also like to thank C. Constán, A. Constán, M.J. Nava, G. Plaza, E. Pastor, N. Vizcaíno and the other collaborators who helped during the laboratory and fieldwork. We thank J. Huesca for the technical support, M.J. Baeza and V.M. Santana for their comments and M.J. Anderson for her statistical suggestions. This research and SCN fellowship were supported by the projects GV06/029 founded by the Generalitat Valenciana, the ESTRES (063/SGTB/2007/7.1) RECUVES projects (077/RN08/04.1) founded by the Spanish Ministry for the Environment and BAHIRA CICYT project (CGL2008-03649/BTE) founded by the Spanish Ministry for the Science and Technology. Font Roja Natura UA Scientific Station (ECFRN UA), which depends on the Office of the Pro-Vice-Chancellorship for Research, Development and Innovation (VIDI) of the University of Alicante, also supported this research.

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  1. Soraya Constán-Nava

    Present address: Estación Científica Font Roja Natura UA, Universidad de Alicante, s/n, 03801, Alcoi, Spain

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Instituto Multidisciplinar para el Estudio del Medio Ramón Margalef, Universidad de Alicante, 99, 03080, Alicante, Spain

    Soraya Constán-Nava & Andreu Bonet

  2. Estación Científica Font Roja Natura UA, Universidad de Alicante, 99, 03080, Alicante, Spain

    Soraya Constán-Nava & Andreu Bonet

  3. Departamento de Ecología, Universidad de Alicante, 99, 03080, Alicante, Spain

    Andreu Bonet

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  1. Soraya Constán-Nava
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Correspondence to Soraya Constán-Nava.

Appendices

Appendix 1

Effect of storage time

In February 2008, we randomly selected 100 seeds (five replicates of 20 seeds) of each year of recollection (2005, 2006 and 2007), regardless of the maternal source of these seeds. These non-stratified seeds were treated with a sodium hypochlorite solution (2 %) for 10 min to avoid fungal infection and re-hydrated with distilled water during 24 h. After the application of this treatment, we located the seeds on Petri dishes in a growth chamber during 31 days under optimum conditions (20 °C, 16/8 h light/dark photoperiod and moist filter paper; Little 1974, Graves 1990). Petri dishes were randomly moved to avoid position effects in the germination chamber. The seeds were examined daily and when the radicle was visible were considered germinated and removed from the Petri dishes. Results are shown above (Fig. 6).

Fig. 6
figure 6

Germination curves of A. altissima seeds from 3 different years of recollection (showed with different dots) after 31 days in a growth chamber. Data are mean percentage ± SE, n = 4)

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Germination rates were not significantly different between the three times of storage (P > 0.05), being of 12 ± 2.5 % in seeds of 2007, 19 ± 6.4 % in seeds of 2006 and 20 ± 3.8 % in seeds of 2005.

Appendix 2

Regression tree

A regression tree (De’ath and Fabricius 2000; Crawley 2007) was performed to analyze the effect of bare soil, perennial herbs, shrubs and trees cover, and litter depth on A. altissima germination percentage. This method allows introducing correlated predictors and detecting non-linear responses. The tree was pruned to improve parsimony using 10-fold cross-validation (De’ath and Fabricius 2000). This analysis was done using the Tree package (Oksanen et al. 2005) for R software (R Development Core Team 2009).

The regression tree assessing the effect of environmental variables explained ~55 % of the variance in seed germination, and pinpointed the percentage of bare soil as the best predictor for seed germination (Fig. 7).

Fig. 7
figure 7

Regression tree model for A. altissima germination. Split values for the predictor used are shown in each branch. Terminal nodes show the mean value for each group of the response variable introduced and the number of cases in each node (between parenthesis; n = 36 cases for the tree). The general fit of the model (D 2, percentage of variance explained by the model), extracted from the null deviance (Deviance root), and the deviance of the final chosen tree after 10-fold cross-validation (Deviance tree) are shown

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Constán-Nava, S., Bonet, A. Genetic variability modulates the effect of habitat type and environmental conditions on early invasion success of Ailanthus altissima in Mediterranean ecosystems. Biol Invasions 14, 2379–2392 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10530-012-0236-7

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